The Point of the Couplet: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie

Abstract

This article explores points of connection between the couplets of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) and the instructional literature of husbandry, arguing that Shakespeare shares with these practical genres a commitment to an aesthetic of didacticism and detachability. Through a reading of the Sonnets alongside Thomas Tusser’s Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557), a popular handbook composed in rhyming couplets, I argue that a poetic tradition of practical fragmentation is embedded in Shakespeare’s couplets, and helps explain a longstanding critical dissatisfaction with the sonnets’ conclusions. Attending both to the imaginative practices of husbandry and to the material forms of the printed page (specifically, practices of indentation), I argue, generates new insights into the operations of a poetic memory performed not by a whole poem, but by detachable, and so storable, fragments.